


siren's call

by Dandybear



Category: Lovecraft Country (TV)
Genre: Between episode 7 and episode 8, Character Study, F/F, Missing Scene, Phone Sex, Smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-17
Updated: 2020-10-17
Packaged: 2021-03-09 03:47:04
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,212
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27068110
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dandybear/pseuds/Dandybear
Summary: She shouldn’t. She should focus on Diana. Find her way out of this web she finds herself burrowing deeper into.The minutes tick by to nine o’clock.Ruby holds her breath.Ring.That siren’s call comes from downstairs, where the phone is. An otherwise private workshop, left abandoned for the day.
Relationships: Ruby Baptiste/Christina Braithwhite
Comments: 18
Kudos: 143





	siren's call

**Author's Note:**

> Wanted to get another fic out before the finale. This is canon-compliant, because Ruby was taking care of Diana for about two or three weeks between episodes (roughly August 26-September 4). I can't see Christina not being annoying during that separation period. 
> 
> Warning: It takes place after Emmett Till's murder, so this fic does touch on that.

The sun going down is hardly a reprieve from the heat. If anything, it just lets that mugginess soak deeper. Nothing seems to get it out. Cold showers are all that can be done, and even that’s just a band aid. Still, after the sun soaks beneath the horizon, it feels different, like the house itself is exhaling. Everything should be quiet, but this is the South Side of Chicago, and there’s always something happening. Life teeming, spilling out into the streets.

Life that used to be inviting to Ruby. Card games played on smokey porches. Playing for anything. Cigarettes, gum sticks, or even on the rare occasion, actual money. Hustling runs in the family. Mama had her own way, Leti has her way, and while Ruby and Marvin have always tried to keep clean, they have their own tactics. Ruby’s a card shark, and if the bills ever get so low that she’s cutting her winter coat open for emergency money, then she’s using that cash on one of those porches for a top up.

Having a hustler for a Mama means she grew up knowing what an exit strategy is. She’s always been the grown up in that situation. Something she can thank Mama’s old business partner, Ella for. The idea of stability sure as hell didn’t come from home.

Which, looking at her current situation is a little ridiculous. She’s the babysitter who hasn’t gone home yet.

It’s not like Hippolyta left her the house, but she left her with the girl in it, so Ruby stays.

Where else would she be?

A car trundles by, grey, and her heart jumps. Wrong make, wrong model, wrong faint outline of a blonde head hidden by tinted windows.

It’s pathetic, maybe.

Dinner is cold sandwiches, because she doesn’t want to use the stove or oven in this heat. Diana doesn’t complain anyway, just makes eye contact with the wall as she eats mechanically.

“Why don’t I feel anything?” she asks quietly.

Ruby parts her lips, wets them, and sighs, “Sometimes it takes time for it to sink in.”

“It didn’t take time for Pops dying to sink in.”

“Really?” Ruby picks a piece of red onion out of her sandwich and eats the ring as is. She doesn’t know why she bought red onions. 

(“Wait, you actually cook?”

A pull of the lips, “Yes. I find it soothes me. The picking ingredients, then finding combinations with the perfect chemistry.”

The knife glides through red onion so thinly it’s like sheets of paper. It’s not the same knife that cut Hillary’s skin off Ruby, but it’s of the same set and that makes her shoulders tense.

“I’d love it if you’d join me. Should be ready at seven,” then that pale throat pausing to take a sip of red wine. Tongue wetting lips. Deft fingers returning to the knife. Ruby caught on her own knife edge of ‘stay’ and ‘go’.

Why does her brain tell her to run, but her body tells her to stay? Take off her coat. Be good company. Why does it feel like the wires between heart and mind are getting crossed?)

Caught in her feelings, Ruby retraces her thoughts, finding Diana’s attention waning anyway. Instead, she sips her sweet tea, “It still feels like George is just on one of his guide trips. That he’s gonna be back with Woody and some new story.”

Diana sniffs.

“I’m sorry. I should have kept that to myself,” Ruby drops her hands.

“No. Maybe. Everyone misses my pops.”

“He was like a father to a lot of us who didn’t have one. Shit, my dad split when Marvin was born, but George was always around when we needed him.”

“He was for Bobo too,” Dee says with little emotion.

“Dee.”

She chews her lip, “Why do  _ they  _ keep killing us?”

How do you answer that?

How does one roll back the clock some 400 years to a war between the Portugese and the Ndongo and connect that dot to the blind disregard a white life has for a black one. What are you supposed to say?  _ They don’t see us as people.  _ This is a conversation for George--or Hippolyta, but who knows when, if ever, if she’ll be back to explain it.

And, Ruby can’t even trust her own head on the situation, because she wants to say, “Just stay away from all white people.” Yet, it’s not even advice she can follow.

“Because they can,” works.

It’s not helpful, and it’s not kind, but it’s honest at least.

“Sometimes, I just wanna kill all of them,” Dee says.

“I know,” Ruby sighs, getting up to hug her. Dee accepts it, albeit limply. She’s working her jaw around some words, then says nothing.

Ruby looks out the window, feeling a twist as woman in a big hat crosses the street. When she turns her head it’s--

Well, it’s more about who it  _ isn’t _ . 

“What do you want to do after dinner?” she says to Diana, eyes still glued to the sidewalk.

“I just wanna be alone.”

“Okay.”

It’s a relief, in its own way. Dee takes the storm cloud into her room and turns up the radio. Being that age and already knotted up with anger and loss. Ruby cleans up, not that there’s much to do but their plates. She keeps an eye on the clock, despite trying not to.

She shouldn’t. She should focus on Diana. Find her way out of this web she finds herself burrowing deeper into.

The minutes tick by to nine o’clock.

Ruby holds her breath.

Ring.

That siren’s call comes from downstairs, where the phone is. An otherwise private workshop, left abandoned for the day.

Riiiiiiing.

Ruby’s not going to answer it.

She’s going to let it ring and ring until the exhausted caller hangs up.

This is the decision she has definitely made as she heads down the stairs, grabbing the phone before the third ring can finish.

She picks up.

Silence, but live air. A breath before a greeting.

Ruby exhales against the receiver, irritated.

“Good evening,” comes out, tinny and distant, but somehow still intimate curling around her ear.

“You know you should really stop calling,” Ruby smiles in spite of herself. Her finger winds its way into the phone’s cord.

“I’ll stop calling when you’re closer and speaking to you doesn’t require the use of a phone,” Christina says.

“You might be calling for a long time then.”

“I’m prepared to.”

That smug affection is so…

So…

“ _ Christina _ ,” Ruby breathes against the mouthpiece, feeling her body melt into the breath against her ear. Despite the distance.

“What did you do today?”

“Looked after Dee, watered the plants, took a few calls in for the guide. Oh, talked to Marvin. He got a tip about a little town just off the highway in Tennessee--”

“Why would anyone bother going to Tennessee.”

“It’s in the middle of things. Can’t go over it. Have to go through it.”

Christina hums. It’s  _ that  _ hum. The verbal version of the  _ look.  _ That searing stare that usually gets Ruby to trail off in what she’s saying or get otherwise annoyed because:  _ it’s not happening _ . Except when it is, and it always is.

Ruby makes a frustrated noise and is answered by a laugh.

“Fuck you.”

“Oh, I wish you would, Ruby.”

Ruby chews her lip, because she wishes too. She hates that she wishes for it, and she hates that just the sight of blonde hair is enough to get her wet these days. She’s gotten far too used to having a warm body between her thighs once, twice, three times a day.

Before she has a chance to recover, Christina’s asking, “What are you wearing right now?”

“A lacy neglige. You know, what I always wear to answer the phone in a garage. Jesus.”

She can see Christina’s face in the silence. That bratty smirk where her eyes get really huge as she holds onto what she’s about to say.

Ruby fights back, despite the growing need to rub her thighs together, “What did you do today?”

Christina blows out her breath, “Tailing Lancaster’s men might actually kill me of boredom. I have gone through so many books waiting for them to decide whether or not to get a coney. Caught a picture. Have you seen the new James Dean yet?”

“Not yet, no.”

“Well, I happen to have two tickets.”

With no one there to judge, Ruby doesn’t fight the smile, “And you have every intention of watching the movie and not, oh, I don’t know, necking with me in the back row.”

Smug silence.

Ruby cups herself through her shorts idly, making sure it’s dark enough for passers not to see her humping her hand.

“You’re naked aren’t you?” she relents.

“I thought about it, but I know how much you like helping me undress.”

“So, what are you wearing then?”

“...A tie.”

“Fuck.”

“How wet are you?”

“Haven’t checked.”

“Liar.”

“Not lying, my hands are outside of my panties.”

The sigh that comes out of Christina is frustrated. Not at Ruby. At the circumstances. And, Ruby doesn’t want to read in to how well she can differentiate her sighs at this point. And she sure as hell doesn’t want to dig in to how badly she misses satin sheets and good morning kisses.

Even if those morning kisses were with William. It’s not his voice teasing her on the phone every night.

“Have you started touching yourself yet?” Ruby asks, wetting her lips.

“Just teasing. Was waiting for you.”

“Do it.”

She sucks in a breath. How do they end up here every night? Why wouldn’t they end up here every night, actually. Ruby always finds herself going willingly. Stuck between want and need, and tangling herself deeper because being tangled feels good. 

Her old life, the life she’s spending in Hippolyta’s house, it’s just pain, and death, and washing dishes.

She has to be here for Dee, but she wants to be coming home to that house in Hyde Park. She wants to feel the soft skin of a pale belly beneath her nose and she wants to kiss and be kissed.

“Ruby, how wet are you?” Christina reiterates.

“You know how wet you get me,” Ruby husks back.

It gets a cute noise out of her, one Ruby wants to bite and chase.

Their breaths mingle, if only over the phone. Just that. A pant back and forth. Not as good as the real thing. Their lips aren’t close enough. Ruby doesn’t have her thighs gripping smooth skin. There’s no body pushing her up and over that edge.

“I miss being inside you,” spills out, almost broken in its rawness.

It catches her off guard and she bites her knuckle to mask the moan. There’s a sound barrier between the garage and the house, sure, but it’s not like Ruby could be as loud as she usually is. As  _ they _ usually are.

“Are you coming?” Christina asks her.

Ruby shakes her head against the receiver, then remembers Christina can’t see her, “Not yet.”

“If it was my tongue on your clit right now you’d be coming.”

Well, that does it. That word. A word so taboo that even the tough boys behind the school blushed at the sound of it. Dropping so easily from the lips of the white devil. 

Ruby mutes the moan that reaches the mouthpiece, but she can hear the delight in Christina’s responding laugh. 

“You best be coming yourself,” Ruby says lazily.

“Oh I did. Just the sound of you.”

“Liar.”

“If you were here you’d be able to attest to it.”

It must be the post-orgasm haze or her own weakening resolve. It’s like she’s a mountain, but Christina’s a river, and all that it takes is time to create those cracks and turn them into canyons. And, Ruby likes it.

“I have to be here for Dee.”

“ _ Have to  _ not  _ want to _ .”

Ruby nods. It’s true. She’s not Diana’s kin. Diana, in fact, has a whole assed living cousin, and an uncle. Not that Ruby is going to leave a child in the care of Montrose Freeman.

“When’s the movie playing?” Ruby sighs.

“Tomorrow night.”

“I’ll give Leti a call.”

“Do you want me to bring the car around or do I have to meet you somewhere?”

Does Ruby want to be seen on the arm of a white man on a Friday night is the question. Seen with a white man just after a little boy has been--

“I’ll meet you in the back row.”

“I look forward to it.”

Silence. Not quite sullen. Waiting for something.

“Goodnight, Christina.”

“Goodnight, Ruby.”

This is the part that makes her cheeks colour harder than the sex or the talk. The sound of a kiss against her ear. One she knows she has to mirror or else risk Christina calling back. That’s all. That’s what she tells herself as she does it on reflex.

She hangs up and flexes her hand, leaning against the desk. Brain swimming, but head empty, she climbs the stairs, feeling Diana’s judgmental eyes through the door.

Because, after all, how could she?

(Easily. And again, and again, and again.)

**Author's Note:**

> Please let me know what you think. Thank you for reading. Honk honk. Stay safe!


End file.
